Phantasm
by Yuzuriha
Summary: Seishirou had been called brilliant for destroying the still world, made of stone and brick and glass.


Phantasm

Author's notes: This was originally written in under an hour for a temps_mort (livejournal community) challenge of character childhood. Seishirou's insecurities have always facinatied me about him, and so I made this. Enjoy.

He loves to watch the maboroshi dance in tune to the music his mother plays. Sometimes she leaves the radio on in the back of the sunroom, where the the wide doors leading to the garden are always open, whether the footsteps leading in and out of it are covered in light snow, or the soft and quiet touch of green in the spring.  
  
Seishirou grew up with music that inspired the creation of towering heights, dancers in their prime dancing until their hearts gave into the mad rush of the score and died in passionate abandon to the delight and horror of all those watching, music listened to with eyes open, that even then made the living world haunted and spinning in those last moments.  
  
It's scratched and grating sounding now, as if the sound, coming from the other ends of the earth and time, traveled through passageways and turns and mazes unknown to get to this place; a rusty instrument that was used because it's presence said that once, something had lived here and it's impression remains forever in this world. He loves to watch the maboroshi as it blooms under his fingertips in his mind, that mural painted around him as he looked upon it, and never after remaining quite the same.  
  
She never accompanies him when he walks out of the estate, tired of the strange but quiet small little spaces that he creates with his fingers like a spider makes a web. Of a period of days, the web is so thick that he can't much see what's behind it anymore. Being trapped in the world of a maboroshi can drive someone mad, she'd said once with that ever present smile. Any other child would have laughed and agreed with her, but he never laughed much anymore.  
  
He creates tiny maboroshis as he walks -- spot rainstorms specifically over the water of the ocean near Kanazawa and not on the beach, while those he allowed to watch it stood, perplexed, in their swimwear and oversize pails full of starfish and wrapped sandwhiches for the day. It always rained in Kanazawa, and so he'd grown adapted to the weather in such a way that he wears his coat even in the summer, always waning as it is. There, way out in the distance, some circular raincloud with a smiling face inside of it's soft depths is showering blood into the sea, and he _does_ laugh; a child at play.  
  
Moving on, he goes to school late, just like every day. He's not sure why he's allowed to, but no one seemed angry if he came or went as he pleased. Such a thing his mother would consider trivial, and his thoughts inelegant, but while he always seems to be pulled in, always wanting to agree with her thoughts, he found he just couldn't do so. He'd met her too late in his life to appreciate her authority in the language of taste, rather than disipline, and his personality wandered aimlessly without any direction nor destination in mind.  
  
So it was with the maboroshi. He creates them obsessively, wherever he goes.. when his stomach is clenched tightly in pain after days without food -- she's forgotten him while she goes to Tokyo to work -- and he finally steals another boy's lunch, he tries his hardest to trick himself by making the simple meal a combination of all his favorite tastes. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't.. the better he gets, the less easily he fools himself into believing. And the less that he cares, no matter how much he'd like to.  
  
He hears the music that drives him to create it in his head now, and the longer he stays away from home, the more maboroshi danced against his fingertips. Soon Kanazawa was a wonderland to the supernatural eye.. perhaps only his own, but then he'd not needed to show anyone. Each passing day made him slower in his walk to school, made his coat heavier, made his fingers longer as he got hungerier and taller. The maboroshi took all of him, and he couldn't bring himself to cease the life of any of his creations, no matter how many years he had kept them up with all his heart behind them.   
  
The world shifted and screamed while he walked, as he likes it to. He settles himself against the long, smooth support of a wall of bamboo, the multiple pressures against his back and the smell of a forest around him as real as it was the daylight to him, but what he really knew was the back of his school and not a garden at all.   
  
Someone was coming, he realizes.  
  
"What're you doing there?" that someone demands, a frustrated looking boy about age, or maybe just a little older. Seishirou was tall for his age, and he couldn't tell what looked average just by seeing -- he'd destroyed his trust in his own seeing when he'd learned to create the world, though he knew for a fact that every one of his illusions represented something in the real world. Seishirou wasn't crazy.  
  
_Of course_, he thought. _I made it all._  
  
He stays silent, not dropping the stolen lunch box, and simply staring at the other boy as if he'd seen a figure made of water rise from the sea and become angry with his presence. Had he created such a thing, he wouldn't have even believed the boy was real, even though his skin was as tan as his own, and his glasses as surely made of metal and glass as Seishirou's reading glasses were.   
  
Real.  
  
The type of child that would grow up to be everything a man could hope to be, if his life had been reasonable and had treated him well enough. His features are average, his jawline strong and body structure not quite as potentially powerful as Seishirou's own would be. The type of man that he could hope to be, with a wife and child, a well paying job in the real world, where everything was sleek and modern and filled with loud noises of the living.  
  
"You don't have to steal other people's lunches," the boy says, softening a little, his brown eyes shifting from incredulous to kind. "Just ask someone."  
  
Seishirou doesn't move. Why was this boy here, if long ago he'd figured out how to cover away any traces of human beings from his Kanazawa maboroshi? And if this was not in per so, why wasn't he getting beaten up for most likely stealing this other boy's lunch? He shifts backward a little, sharp, the overly cautious way of a wild animal cornered in it's home. Maybe if he shows him, he would run away in fear? The madness world of the maboroshi that only he knew how to live normally in?  
  
But when he allowed the multi colored lights of his work to gently flash over the brown haired boy, there was no real _horror_ in his eyes.. no fear of the tall streaks of bamboo that pierced the sky with their tops, dragon flies the size of dogs lilting above their heads, the ground shifting and becoming impressioned by each movement of their feet upon it, as if Kanazawa were made of quicksand and nothing more. The sky is dark, and in the distance, always in the distance, samurai armor with no men of honor inside them battle on horses made of dead flesh.  
  
He'd lived here since he was seven years old, and had forgotten what the buildings, dismal blue-gray sky, and people of Kanazawa looked like, underneath it all.   
  
Still, he stares at the boy.  
  
"..Did you make this?" asks the older of them.  
  
After a moment more of silence, and a new level of perplexion on either boy's part, Seishirou nods. Never before had someone been allowed to enroach on his private space, and not instantly gone mad from the mere sight of it, as his mother had predicted that they would. This boy seemed almost just as at ease in this world of his creation than the real one, and had not become insane with it's gentle, mindlessly strange touch like so many others. His thirteen year old voice rasps from disuse, making it illusionarily deeper, even if he himself seemed and felt small in comparison. Maybe someday he'd live up to that.   
  
"Why aren't you screaming and going mad?" Seishirou asks bluntly, and while relatively toneless, there shows just the barest thread of threat.  
  
The other simply looks at him, perhaps the vague outline of a soft smile coming to his everyday features. "Because all of this isn't real, and you can't get confused by thinking it is, or you will go crazy, ne?"  
  
He shivers; the wind had suddenly gone cold as his stomach dropped, though the older boy didn't feel it. Of course -- he wasn't here with him, after all. "Hey, are you okay?" he hears, though he'd already dropped the half eaten bento lunchbox, had already edged to the end of the bamboo forest, poised to run across the black lake and over the water to the island that was at one time main street.  
  
Before he could run, a dancing twirl of kimono, people with invisible skin and grotesque masks, flies across his way -- he yells in surprise and stumbles backward, falling to the ground.  
  
There is a shadow above him, though there was a weight to it less unnatural than that of the dancers -- music he could no longer hear because it was drowned out by a thousand other songs of each tiny maboroshi, and he breathes slowly to calm himself before looking up.   
  
The other boy is looking at him sadly, and Seishirou frowns. There was no reason to be so upset by that.  
  
"You've got to come out of there. Couldn't you tell that they weren't real?"  
  
He freezes.   
  
  
  


  
  
For a long time afterward, he questioned his own motivation to take, one by one, each of his maboroshi down. But as they did, melting away into the gray simplicity of his school that he realized he'd never actually seen before, all memory of how to duplicate the charmed universe of his imagination faded.  
  
_"I didn't catch your name,"_ the boy he'd met had said as he'd struggled up, ready to run again.  
  
It was hard to say.  
  
_"Sakurazuka."  
  
"Aa. Aoki Seiichirou."_  
  
And now wherever he went, he knew he could have confidence that what he saw was what was indeed there. Still, he created illusions, but never again did they live with lives of their own, and never, when he made them, did they catch the eye of his own fancy -- a still world, made of stone and brick and glass.  
  
And he heard the music no more.


End file.
